Welcome to the Wicking Up Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, in this podcast I'm actually releasing an interview that I did on someone else's podcast.

That podcast is after on and the interviewer is Rob Reed. Rob founded the company which built Rhapsody, the music service that created the unlimited on-demand streaming model that Spotify and Apple and others have since adopted.

Rob has also spent lots of time throughout the Middle East, including a year as a full bright scholar in Cairo.

He's an investor, but he's mainly a novelist these days. He started his podcast originally as a limited run to promote his novel, also titled After On.

Now he's going to continue it indefinitely. Many people who heard this interview originally thought it was unusually good, not that I'm unusually good in it, but that we covered a lot of ground.

We certainly did. Rob and I talk about publishing and psychedelics and terrorism and meditation, free speech, and many other things.

In fact, Chris Anderson, the curator of the TED conference, heard it and got in touch with me and suggested that I release the interview on my own podcast.

He felt this interview covered topics that I don't often touch or at least don't touch in that way. I don't take strong recommendations from Chris lightly.

The man really knows how to put on a show. With Rob's permission, I'm giving you a slightly edited version of the podcast he released.

I have to give you a little warning about the sound quality. We tried to clean it up on our end, but there are a lot of popped peas.

It's probably best to listen to in your car or at your desk, but Rob is a great interviewer.

And he since had many other interesting guests on his podcast. So if you like the angle he took with me here, you might check him out at After-DashOn.

And you can find out much more about his book there too.

And now without further delay, I bring you the conversation I had with Rob Reed.

So Sam, thank you so much for joining me here at Tom Merritt's lovely home studio. Yeah, happy to do it.

You were a guest on the Art of Charm podcast about a year ago. And they asked you to describe what you do in a single sentence. And you said, I think in public, which I thought was a very elegant way of putting it.

I was hoping you might elaborate on that. And in this case, feel free to use as many sentences as you wish.

Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought that back to me because I would have totally forgotten that description. It's a useful one.

Increasingly, I'm someone who's attempting to have hard conversations about what I consider some of the most important questions of our time.

So I said the intersection of philosophy, particularly moral philosophy and science and public policy and just things in the news.

Topics like race and terrorism, the link between Islam and jihadism and things that are in the news.

But that have when you begin to push on these issues, they run very, very deep into the core of human identity and how we want our politics to proceed and the influence of technology on our lives.

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